Founded in 1994, Funimation Entertainment struggled to get anywhere in the entertainment market. Wanting to bring the Dragon Ball franchise to America, the company was failing to do so until in 1998 they managed to get it to air on the Cartoon Network as part of the Toonami programming block. It found great success with this series, leading to them to license lots of other different anime in the US. In 2005 the company was purchased by the Navarre Corporation, but recently this company has put Funimation up for sale again.

Whilst the company has released many DVD sets in America -including ones for popular anime such as Dragon Ball Z, Full Metal Alchemist and Yu Yu Hakusho -one of the most popular aspects of the company website is the fact that it lets you watch episodes of various anime for free. This includes Fist of the North Star, with both Hokuto no Ken and Hokuto no Ken 2 being available. Every single episode can be viewed on their site.

For a while, anyone in the world could view the episodes on the site, but then something tragic happened that pretty much ruined it for anyone outside America. On May 30th, 2009, someone, or a group of people, went onto the Funimation site and managed to download episode 403 of One Piece. Said episode was a brand new one that was meant to air simultaneously in Japan and America. It had not ever been broadcast before. However the hackers got the episode and then quickly illegally redistributed it, meaning many people saw it before it was officially broadcast.

Toei, the company who animates One Piece, reportedly went berserk, canceling any future plans for simultaneous broadcasts and promptly pulled the rights to distribute the show from all its online partners. The fact that the way the hacker got the episode was by simply typing in the URL and changing a couple of letters/numbers pretty much forced Funimation to review their security policies. Toei eventually calmed down enough to have companies start showing One Piece again, but the damage was done.

Later on in 2009, anyone outside American who tried to access the video player would get the message above (click on it to make it bigger). Up to around October 2010, this was still the case. This caused issues for a lot of people who were enjoying watching the free stuff. Whether the video player will ever be made available to people outside America again is still unknown, but it seems highly unlikely.